Walt spat within an inch of the trooper’s boot. “I’ll look forward to that party.”
I STAND BY THE Tahoe with Walker Dennis, who is still sighting down his AR-15 at Ozan as Walt makes his way to Drew’s pickup truck.
“I’d like you to cover us until we’re clear here,” I tell him. “Then escort me back to Vidalia.”
“What about Garrity?”
“He needs to stay on these guys. As soon as I’m back in Vidalia, I want you to go to wherever you have Deputy Hunt and move him again. Find out everything he knows about the Knoxes, but don’t kill him. Right now he’s the only leverage we have against Forrest.”
“Understood.”
Drew Elliott’s truck starts up and begins rolling toward us. “And Walker? Switch vehicles before you do it. We’re not the only ones who know about GPS trackers.”
Walker nods, his rifle still trained on the lake house.
When the truck reaches me, I pat Walker on the shoulder, then climb into the passenger seat beside Walt.
“Does Knox even know where Tom is?” he asks.
“I don’t think so. I think Snake has stashed Dad somewhere.”
“Oh, man. Lord, just give me ten minutes in a cell with Snake Knox and no cameras.”
“You’re not going to get it. That’s why we’re splitting up.”
“What?”
“I’m going back to the sheriff’s office. I can use Sonny’s tattoo to buy my way back into the interrogations. You find a good spot to lie up and monitor Forrest by GPS. If he and Ozan make a move, stay with them. If they go to where Dad is, and you feel you have a chance, kill them and get him out of there. Or call Dennis and me, and we’ll help you hit them.”
Walt thought this through. “And if that call Knox just made was to order Tom killed?”
“There’s only so much we can control, Walt. Let’s get to it. Take me back to my Audi.”
He shifts into Drive and pulls onto the narrow lake road.
“What was that between you and Ozan there at the end?” I ask.
“Just a little flirting. Nothing to worry about.”
CHAPTER 60
THE VIEW FROM Danny McDavitt’s helicopter had been overwhelming in its way, but the view from Mose Tyler’s johnboat was oppressive. Traveling through the cypress swamp at water level felt like trying to navigate the delta of a great jungle river. Part of the time the boat was driven by a small, outboard Evinrude, but at other times the old man had to switch to an electric trolling motor. Tyler appeared to be over eighty, and he moved with an arthritic slowness that Caitlin recognized from her father-in-law’s careful motions.
Their guide said little, even in response to questions, and Caitlin soon began to doubt that he could even see well enough to read the map they had shown him. But he’d been happy to take two hundred dollars from her, and right now she had little choice but to trust the old man.
Just as she began to wonder whether they should head back to their car, a stand of massive cypress trees came into view. They dwarfed the ones she had seen up until now. Their trunks were as thick as economy cars, and the great knees that jutted out of the water around them looked like boulders made of wood. Several trees had wide cracks in them, as the story in Henry’s files claimed the Bone Tree did. But Mose Tyler seemed disinclined to stop and investigate these gigantic specimens. When Caitlin turned to Jordan for support, the photographer merely shrugged and went on shooting pictures with her plastic-wrapped Nikon.
Amazingly, the trees grew even larger as they sailed deeper into the swamp. Many stood on grassy tussocks that rose like hobbit hills out of the water, and these trees seemed somehow more alive than the oaks and pines Caitlin was accustomed to seeing. The wildlife became more abundant, too. Caitlin saw a water moccasin swimming like a slowly curling whip, its wedge-shaped head lifted above the water. A young alligator rested on a log in a single shaft of sunlight. And farther on, a pair of deer swam with surprising speed between two grassy hummocks.
“I didn’t know deer could swim,” she said with awe.
“Deer be good swimmers,” Mose mumbled. “Better get your raincoat on, if you got one.”
As though summoned by the old man’s words, Caitlin heard a high-pitched hiss over the water. A silver gray curtain was rolling toward them through the trees. The mirrored surface of the swamp suddenly erupted into chaos, and the hiss grew into the crazed snapping of water thrown on a hot griddle. The cold rain quickly worked its way under the collar of her jacket, soaking her bandanna and running down her back. Caitlin made sure that Carl’s walkie-talkie was staying dry in her zippered bag.
Mose tolerated the downpour with the equanimity of a cow, and Jordan reacted much the same. Caitlin shrugged away the rain and focused on the forest around them. The massive trees with their great gnarled knees reminded her of the Tree of Life in the Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida. They weren’t that big, of course. That tree was fourteen stories tall, and riddled with hidden passageways. But the giant cypresses here looked fifty feet around, and their fibrous trunks seemed like natural models of the great columns at Karnak.
“I read that some of these trees could be seven hundred years old,” she told Mose and Jordan.
“These trees ain’t nothing,” said the fisherman. “When I was a boy, you couldn’t hardly come through here. Then a rich man sent saw-gangs in here one summer. They cut all the oldest trees. They’d cut them down, then wait for the winter rains, chain them together, and float ’em out to be sawed up for lumber. All them trees gone now. Nothing left but these littl’uns.”
Caitlin could scarcely imagine trees that dwarfed the ones before her. “Are we anywhere near that X on the map?”
The old man killed the Evinrude, then leaned to his left and pointed past Jordan in the bow of the boat.
Caitlin followed the line of his weathered hand. An eight-foot-tall fence like the ones they had seen on the way in blocked their path.